Photos by Jonathan Sharp
Text by Pete Vack
The display of the three B.A.T. Alfas was held at the Phillips Auction House in Berkeley Square, London and only displayed for four days, November 20-23. Jonathan Sharp attended on a Wednesday afternoon and here is the third of three reports.
While the BAT 9 (aka BAT 9d) will eternally be tied with the story of Gary Kaberle, it failed to attract a lot of attention when introduced at Turin in the spring of 1955. Press coverage had been high with the BAT 7 of 1954, but by the time the third and definitely less dramatic BAT appeared, it was no longer newsworthy, despite being much more roadworthy. It was not until December 1958 that BAT 9 appeared on the cover of Road & Track, no longer news. The Kaberle story is well known, but we’ll recap it here.
Strother MacMinn traced the history of B.A.T. 9d for AQ V33-3, but we still don’t know how or when it arrived in the U.S. At Sebring in 1956, the car was in the spectator parking lot with a “For Sale” sign on it. Chicago car dealer Harry Woodnorth made an offer for the car and split the cost with Tom Barrett, who agreed to drive the car back to Chicago. He did about 100 miles before he cried “Uncle” and hired a transporter. It took two years but Woodnorth finally sold it to an Ed Beseler, who had it painted red. After his death, the car ended up at Chapin Motors, a Dodge/Chrysler/Fiat dealer in Greenville, Michigan, and that’s where Kaberle found it in 1962.
Kaberle, then only 17, was driving to a county fair when he spotted it. In a 2015 interview with Michigan Today, Kaberle recalled that “It kind of looked like a space ship. I didn’t know if it was pretty or ugly. I just knew, ‘This is cool.’” He bought it for $2600, (a huge amount at the time), sold it for about a million dollars in 1991 to help save the life of his wife, who had cancer. After her death, Kaberle went on to create BAT 11dk with the assistance of Bertone Style as a tribute to his wife. The B.A.T. joined a Japanese collection and today is with the Blackhawk.
Says Jonathan Sharp: “The display was held at the Phillips auction house in Berkeley Square London and only displayed for four days, November 20-23. I attended on a Wednesday afternoon so it was nice and quiet. The entry to the exhibition was free.”
Looking positively civilized in its last iteration, B.A.T. 9d lost the dramatic impact of its predecessors.
Aiming to create more of a GT car and needing a direct connection with Alfa, Scaglione forgot penetration and allowed the use of the new Giulietta grille.
The use of skirts was discontinued, but the front wheels were still half-covered. Visually (we think) it would have made more sense to either keep all four wheels covered or fully open, as was the case with the later but related Alfa Sprint Speciale.
Delicate front end treatment of the last B.A.T. When Kaberle bought the car in 1962, the dealer installed a chrome nerf bar which extended across the Giulietta grille for protection.
More GT than showcar, B.A.T. 9d was still not always a comfortable fit for tall Americans. After purchasing the car in 1956, Tom Barrett found the ‘tightly confining’ car a headache after only 100 miles.
The original show car colors were two tone with what appears to have been a black lower half below the beltline ala Ferrari BB. Probably better off in one color.
In the brochure Phillips describe the cars as being game changers, much like the Eiffel Tower, the Atomium in Brussels and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, and comparable to Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d Avignon, Rene Margrittes Ceci n pas une pipe and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which fundamentally transformed our notion of art, and can be likened to Marcel Breur’s Wassily Chair, the De Havilland Comet airliner, Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge and Apple’s I phone with their enduring impact on the world of design. We’ll let our readers decide.
All three also were displayed in June 2019 at RM’s 40th Anniversary celebration in Chatham-Kent, Ontario.
In the recent sequence of displays and the comparison with work of art milestones I sense a marketing campaign. The crossover from automobiles to art (or “art to automobiles” if you prefer) is being tested and the B.A.T.s are more representative of the intersection than, say, the ex-Michael Schumacher Ferrari F2001 that RM Sotheby’s sold at Sotheby’s New York evening contemporary art auction in November 2017. That car brought $6.7 million hammer, $7,504,000 with commission, a breathtaking premium over its pre-sale estimate of $4-$5.5 million. It went to a new client previously unknown to either RM or Sotheby’s, tending to endorse the automobiles to art crossover.
Time will tell….
I saw these cars when they were displayed in Michigan in late 2000s. At the same time ALFA had a new 8C on display also. Keep your fingers crossed….you MAY get another chance to see them in the next couple of years…again in S/E Michigan 😉
Simply awesome design.